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Monday, June 15, 2015

The Poisonous, Exploitive, and Absurd Legacy of White Supremacy in the U.S.: Rachel Dolezal Pretends To Be A Black Woman And Deludes Others As Well as Herself

Rachel Dolezal stands in front of a mural she painted, in July 2009. Nicholas K. Geranios/AP

All,

This entire bizarre episode is yet another stark and disturbing example of the endlessly destructive and clinically pathological impact that the venal doctrine of white supremacy--as both doctrine and practice-- has had and continues to have on American society and culture. The truly tragic, absurd, and ultimately perverse dimensions of this pervasive social, cultural, and spiritual malady thus go far beyond questions of individual identity formation and expression, and encompass an entire society's obsessively delusional and deeply distorted notions of exactly "who" and "what" we are as human beings in an ongoing historical and ideological context that brazenly denies, oppresses, and marginalizes our humanity in the name of racial hierarchies that various people use to acquire and maintain privilege, power, and status/approval at the expense of others. The mere assertion of "good intentions" thus has little or nothing to do with this larger reality in the final analysis. What really counts is integrity, honesty, moral courage, authenticity, and ethical commitment. In a sane society one would clearly understand that no amount of "blackface" or "whiteface" posturing and role playing could possibly make up for that.

Remember: Rachel Dolezal as individual and cultural metaphor is merely a microcosm of that much larger and far more profound problem that lies at the heart of what is so deeply wrong and poisonous about this country and its truly infantile and debilitating lies that it and we tell ourselves when we can't or simply won't tell the truth about ourselves and instead neurotically settle for the phony self serving god of false consciousness masquerading as "identity"...

Rachel Dolezal, whose story sparked a national conversation over racial identity, is stepping down as the president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In a message to the organization's executive committee, Dolezal said her resignation is in the best interest of the NAACP.

Dolezal made national news after it emerged that she had been presenting herself as being of mixed race when she was really born to white parents. Pictures showed that Dolezal had even undertaken a physical transformation through the years.

"In the eye of this current storm, I can see that a separation of family and organizational outcomes is in the best interest of the NAACP," Dolezal said in a statement posted to the organization's Facebook page. "It is with complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the NAACP that I step aside from the presidency and pass the baton to my Vice President, Naima Quarles-Burnley."

Over her time at the NAACP, Dolezal had become a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. On Friday, as the drama unfolded, the NAACP issued a statement in support of Dolezal.

"One's racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership," the statement read.

In her statement, Dolezal does not directly address why she identified as black, Native American and white in a government form. She does say that many have opined without knowing the full story, but she doesn't give more details.

"While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving human consciousness, we can NOT afford to lose sight of the five Game Changers (Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare, Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights and Political Representation) that affect millions, often with a life or death outcome," Dolezal wrote.

A black college student named Lauren Campbell posted this interview with Rachel Dolezal on youtube

In early 2014, she had the opportunity to interview Rachel Dolezal for her senior thesis. These videos are unedited.Here is part 5. She is addressing her "mixed identity" and more:https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=43&v=37iNx5YYR_Y

“Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear,”
wrote Walter White, the former head of the National Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People in 1947. “Men and women who have decided
that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the
proscription and humiliation which the American colour line imposes on
them.”

People “passing” for one race, when they are in fact another, has a long tradition in America. Indeed, as long as there has been racial privilege, there have always been people seeking to game the system.

Dolezal’s case is intriguing for two reasons: why she did it and how she did it.

First, people generally “pass” in order to advance their life chances. Given the nature of America’s racial hierarchy,
improving one’s lot in such a drastic manner involved black people
passing as white – not white people heading the other way. In One Drop,
Bliss Broyard recalls white people running from the public records
office in Louisiana in tears, having traced their lineage and discovered
they had black ancestors.

There’s a reason why there’s not a mass movement with the hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter.

Second, as anyone who has read Philip Roth’s Human Stain or Nella
Larsen’s Passing knows, to successfully transition from one race to
another, you have to cut yourself off from all those who knew you in
your previous racial incarnation. When you pass from one racial domain
to another, you’re supposed to slam the door shut behind you and throw
away the key. You say goodbye not just to the boxes you ticked but the
people you knew, including family.

Cutting yourself off from your past is simply not possible in the internet age, where pictures of Rachel Dolezal
in African head wraps, presenting herself as black, sit awkwardly with
those of her as a blonde-haired teenager with two white parents. It’s
amazing she thought she’d ever get away with it.

Rachel Dolezal, after and before. Photograph: NAACP / internet

Dolezal’s deception does highlight the longstanding contradictions and complexities of racial categories in a country where both racism and race-mixing have been the norm.
When running for governor in the 1950s, Alabama populist Jim Folsom
asked why white people were getting so worked up about the sacredness of
segregation, when it looked to him as though there was “a whole lot of
integratin’ goin’ on at night”. As King’s College professor Paul Gilroy once told me: “Everybody is mixed, but not everybody counts as mixed.”

Unfortunately, the story of Rachel Dolezal also compounds those
contradictions. It is a cardinal rule of social identity that people
have the right to call themselves whatever they want. That’s as true for
Dolezal as it is for Caitlyn Jenner. But with this right comes at least one responsibility: what you call yourself must be comprehensible to others.

“A tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a
vine, or a cow,” explains Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Ethics of
Identity. “The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity
is a good thing ... but that the identity must make some kind of sense.”

The problem for Dolezal is that her “black” identity does not make
sense. Right now, one can only speculate to her motivations. There are
plenty of white people involved in the kind of civil rights work she was
doing – particularly in Spokane, where just 2% of the population is
black. Her parents say that she had black adopted siblings, had a black
circle of friends where she grew up in Mississippi – that she has
married, and later divorced, a black man.

All of which might make Rachel Dolezal a white woman who identifies
closely with the black community. It does not make her black.

Black Like Who? Rachel Dolezal’s Harmful Masqueradeby TAMARA WINFREY HARRISJUNE 16, 2015New York TimesRachel A. Dolezal, who stepped down Monday as president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., could have been a powerful ally to African-Americans. The participation of white allies has always been important to anti-racism work. By most accounts, she is educated about black cultures and an advocate for black causes. But empathy evolved into impersonation. And Ms. Dolezal’s subterfuge, made easier by the legacy of racism in America, undermines the very people she claims to support.

“I identify as black,” Ms. Dolezal told Matt Lauer on the “Today” show this morning. That may be. But actual black people, like me, don’t have the option of choosing.

The details are by now well known. Her estranged parents and Ms. Dolezal’s Montana birth certificate confirm that she is white (allegedly with some Native American ancestry).

Related coverage:

Rachel A. Dolezal stepped down as president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Spokane, Wash., on Monday.Rachel Dolezal, Ex-N.A.A.C.P. Official: ‘I Identify as Black’JUNE 16, 2015Ms. Dolezal grew up with adoptive black siblings, one of whom she currently parents, and she has a biological son with her former husband, who is black. She attended a historically black college, Howard University. (While there, though, she identified as a white woman, even filing a lawsuit in 2002 for discrimination, since dismissed, on race and other grounds.) Ms. Dolezal eventually appeared to have darkened her skin. She adopted hairstyles associated with black women and claimed at least partial African-American heritage on an application for the Spokane police commission.

Some people have pointed to this strange case as an illustration that race is malleable. I submit that Ms. Dolezal is a reminder that it is not. Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed. And historically, the path to whiteness has been extremely narrow.

The “one-drop rule,” which, for much of American history, legally defined as black anyone with a black ancestor, was used to keep black people from adopting whiteness. Ironically, it has made it easier for Ms. Dolezal to claim blackness without others questioning the assertion. If they are not themselves of a similar hue to Ms. Dolezal, many black people watching her story unfold can recognize in her features a cousin, parent or grandparent. African-Americans vary in appearance from light-skinned to coal black, straight- to curly-haired, keen- to broad-featured, and every possible combination in between.

This diversity is partly a result of this one-drop rule. The original intent of it was to protect racial privilege. Sometimes, if their appearance borrowed enough from white ancestors, black Americans could “pass” in white society. But that social sleight of hand came with many dangers, such as the chance that black lineage would be outed in the skin or hair of one’s progeny. Segregation simply would not work if society was fuzzy on who got the nice drinking fountain, the front seat on the bus and the right to vote.

In 1924, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, a series of anti-miscegenation laws that would be overturned by the landmark case Loving v. Virginia in 1967. The act defined a white person as someone with blood that was “entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.” Yet when faced with the fact that many rich Virginia planters claimed to be descendants of Pocahontas, the state allowed that a white person could be up to 1⁄16 Native American. A person with 1⁄16 black blood, however, was still black.

The definition of blackness under the one-drop rule included those with the barest African ancestry. For example, in 1977, Susie Guillory Phipps, a 43-year-old Louisiana native who had been raised as a white woman, was “sickened” to receive a birth certificate that listed her race as “colored.” Under a 1970 Louisiana state law, anyone with “1⁄32 Negro blood” was black. Challenged by Ms. Phipps, the state spent thousands of dollars tracing her heritage back to an enslaved black great-great-great-great-grandmother. Louisiana overturned its version of the one-drop rule in 1983.

The legacy of the one-drop rule endures in the 21st century. Historic racism may have flung wide the doors to blackness, but whiteness is immutable. According to the genetic testing company 23andMe, the average black American is roughly a quarter white. But even brown-skinned black people with significant European ancestry cannot become white. Who would accept President Obama, raised by a biological white mother and grandparents, as a white man? Precisely no one.

Ms. Dolezal may not be able to claim even a drop of African-American ancestry, but the way blackness has long been determined means that few would question a woman who presents as white but claims to be black. She was able to trade on a racist element of history to pass believably as a black woman.

In the days since this story broke, many people have been quick to point out that race is merely a social construct — as if that fact changes the very real impact of race on the lives of minorities. The persistence of systemic racism means there are penalties for blackness in America.

Black women — real ones — live at the nexus of that oppression and enduring sexism. The gender pay gap is steeper for them. They are more likely than their white counterparts to live in poverty, to be victims of domestic homicide and sexual assault. If Tyisha Miller or Rekia Boyd, black women who were victims of extrajudicial violence, had been able to slide into whiteness — for just a moment — they might still be alive. (Perplexingly, Ms. Dolezal told Matt Lauer that her decision to identify as black was a matter of “survival.” That is rich, indeed.) But racial oppression is not as easy to shrug off as racial advantage. This is partly because America has spent centuries ensuring that certain people can never be white.

Being able to shift one’s race is a privilege. Ms. Dolezal’s masquerade illustrates that however much she may empathize with African-Americans, she is not one, because black people in America cannot shed their race. We cannot proclaim the black race a nebulous concept, while strictly policing whiteness and the privileges of that identity. I will accept Ms. Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her.

Tamara Winfrey Harris is the author of “The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America.”

PAUL BEATTY

In Paul Beatty’s new novel ‘The Sellout’ (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2015) the protagonist converts the "long out-of-business brushless car wash" in his L.A. ghetto into a "tunnel of whiteness" for the local children, with "several race wash options:

Regular Whiteness:Benefit of the DoubtHigher Life ExpectancyLower Insurance Premiums

Deluxe Whiteness:Regular Whiteness PlusWarnings instead of Arrests from the PoliceDecent Seats at Concerts and Sporting EventsWorld Revolves Around You and Your ConcernsSuper Deluxe Whiteness:Deluxe Whiteness Plus Jobs with Annual BonusesMilitary Service Is for SuckersLegacy Admission to College of Your ChoiceTherapists That ListenBoats That You Never UseAll Vices and Bad Habits Referred to as "Phases"Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious

Malcolm X (1925-1965)

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)

"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."

Nina Simone (1933-2003)

"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)

"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .

Angela Davis (b. 1944)

"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857

Cecil Taylor (b. 1929)

“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”

Ella Baker (1903-1986)

"Strong people don't need strong leaders"

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

"The artist must take sides, He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery, I had no alternative"

John Coltrane (1926-1967)

"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."

Miles Davis (1926-1991)

"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."

C.L.R. James (1901-1989)

"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."

Edward Said (1935-2003)

“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not﻿ waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

Editor's Bio

Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.